What are these? customer is reporting that the black tile is OK the red/orange colour are not quite badly pitted. She described them as a quarry tile but they look more like a terracotta - any ideas not seen these in person yet
Graeme
I have done several of these floors! They are almost certainly quarry tiles! The only other thing they could have been were dust pressed geometric Victorian / Edwardian tiles and they are almost certainly not those!
OK! A few problems if I am interpreting the pictures correctly!
Firstly the face of a lot of the tiles look like they have spalled (broken up) this means when you have cleaned them the surface will look like the moon lots of pits and fissures. So they will look like the rough side of a brick. This means that sometime in their life the faces have been covered with a wax or non breathable sealer and the face surface has spalled. Ultimately they will be next to impossible to keep clean unless you apply a decent topical sealer to them in several coats.
Secondly I may be wrong here but if you look at the black ones carefully they look as though they have been actually painted black and the paint looks like it has worn through in patches.
You need to manage the customers expectations here! My advice is if they are not in a listed building then I would
1. Rip the whole floor up and have a new one relaid. If they want quarries again then no problem.
2. If they don't want to go to that expense then deep clean the floor then seal it with an impregnating sealer and then add a topical sealer.
3. If after cleaning you want to make the floor surface slightly smoother then you could hone it with a Diamond Pad to get the worst off but you risk damaging what is left of the tiles with the intact surfaces.
If you want to read more on quarry tiles then go to this link:
http://www.ruabonsales.co.uk/how-is-a-quarry-tile-made.htmKev Martin
marblelife Ltd
Tiling Logistics
